Pluto Probe Spies Weird 'Dark Pole' on Big Moon Charon (Photos)

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NASA's New Horizons spacecraft has spotted a strange dark patch
at the pole of Pluto's big moon Charon, further whetting
researchers' appetites ahead of the probe's epic flyby of the
dwarf planet system next month.

New Horizons has also detected a rich diversity of terrain types
in Pluto's "close approach hemisphere" — the side of the planet
New Horizons will zoom past at a distance of just 7,800 miles
(12,500 kilometers) on July 14. The newly resolved features,
which New Horizons captured in images taken from May 29 through
June 19, are visible in a Pluto-Charon
video NASA released today.

"This system is just amazing. The science team is just ecstatic
with what we see on Pluto’s close approach hemisphere: Every
terrain type we see on the planet — including both the brightest
and darkest surface areas — are represented there. It’s a
wonderland!" New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern, of
the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder,
Colorado, said
in a statement. "And about Charon — wow — I don’t think
anyone expected Charon to reveal a mystery like dark terrains at
its pole. Who ordered that?" [ Destination
Pluto: NASA's New Horizons Mission in Pictures ]

During a mission-update webcast today (June 23), New Horizons
team members also reported that the spacecraft performed a
course-adjusting engine burn on June 14 that will put the probe
in an ideal position to observe Pluto
and its moons during the upcoming close encounter.

"We need to be arriving at
Pluto at the right time and at the right location to maintain
geometry for science observations," Gabe Rogers, New Horizon's
guidance and control engineer from the Johns Hopkins University
Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, said during
today's update. The mission plan includes a specific arrival
point, a region roughly 62 miles wide by 93 miles long (100 by
150 km).

Rogers said that, before the June 14 engine burn, the spacecraft
had been on course to reach Pluto about 80 seconds earlier than
planned. New Horizons is zooming along at about 32,000 mph
(51,500 km/h), so a mere 80 seconds could put the spacecraft off
target by a few hundred kilometers.

Stern said the correction was a success, and the probe is on
course to "get that hole in one" when it reaches Pluto on July
14. It is highly likely the team will have to make one more
course correction before then, Rogers added.

In the past week, New Horizon's path to Pluto was declared "all
clear" of dust and debris, said Hal Weaver, a project scientist
for the mission. Once again, when traveling at over 30,000 mph, a
collision with a relatively small rock could seriously damage the
spacecraft (which is why it's
wearing a bulletproof vest ). Weaver said the most recent
debris search was the deepest yet and did not turn up any
potentially dangerous objects.

In addition to looking for hazards, the deep search was also
hunting for new satellites around Pluto, but found none. The team
will continue to probe for small moons (in addition to the
five
moons that are already known) in the leadup to closest
approach.

Pluto is one of the largest known objects in the Kuiper
belt, a region beyond Neptune that scientists think contains
hundreds of thousands of rocky, icy objects. Because Pluto is
less than one-fifth the diameter of Earth, and because it orbits
an average distance of 3.7 billion miles (5.9 billion km) from
the sun, even the most powerful telescopes on or near Earth
cannot resolve many details about the dwarf planet's surface.

New Horizons will be the first probe to study Pluto up close,
providing new information about the object's exact size, its
atmospheric composition, the composition of ices on its surface
and the topology of its surface.

"Anybody who thinks we're going to go to Pluto and find cold,
dead rock is in for a rude awakening," said Bill McKinnon, a
co-investigator for the New Horizons mission. "I think we're
going to find a very dynamic planet."